Fair warning here – about half the dialogue is in Spanish. But with just my many decades old Spanish classes from the dim past, it really wasn’t that hard to follow. It’s pretty simple, and most of it you can get from context. But. So you know. This is the second book from McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, after All the Pretty Horses. There is no connection between any of the characters, but the milieu is definitely the same.
Billy and Boyd Parham are two brothers, sons of a hard-scrabble farmer on the bootheel of New Mexico, not long before the start of WWII. When Billy, all of 16 years old, saves a pregnant wolf from getting shot, he feels it isn’t right for her to be so far from her kind and her home in the mountains of Mexico. So, taking his father’s horse, he sets about trying to bring her home. The wolf is very much not tame, but eventually he ends up with a sort of rope and bridle situation, and off they go. It eventually does not go well. He gets back home, after a few years, to find his parents dead and his brother fending for himself.
This time the both of them go back to Mexico and each finds his fate. It’s the evocative writing, though, that sets these books apart. This is when Billy first comes across the wolves.
They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire.
